I didn’t watch the Grammys because I don’t bother watching the Grammys. But apparently I missed lots and lots of demons. They were everywhere, it seems, shooting out from TV screens to scare the wingnuts. Bryan Fischer thinks Beyonce and Katy Perry have sold their souls to the devil.
Every day I troll the fringe backwaters of the right wing (which are getting less fringe-y every day) but every once in a while I come across someone who is so off-the-charts oblivious that it leaves an indentation when my head hits the desk. Larry SECEDE Kilgore (he actually made SECEDE his middle name legally), who is running for Texas governor as a Republican, makes Bryan Fischer sound like Voltaire. He wants Texas to secede from the United States and become a theocracy where gay people would be put to death — and he thinks gay people should help him achieve his goal.
Like me, Andrew Sullivan gives out awards named after people (in fact, I stole the idea from him). One of them is the Hewitt Award, named after Hugh Hewitt, and is given for “the most egregious attempts to label Barack Obama as un-American, alien, treasonous, and far out of the mainstream of American life and politics.” And like Bryan Fischer on this blog, he’s now won his own award for this inane statement:
Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, whose organization is home to some of the most extreme and inflammatory voices on the right, can’t imagine where all the ugly accusations of Obama being a terrorist-loving Muslim come from. It can’t be from a “mainstream pro-family or Christian group” like his. Speaking of an interview he did with Christian writer Os Guinness, he says:
Deranged bigot Scott Lively has been making the rounds of the wingnut radio talk shows lately and the latest is Bryan Fischer. He told Fischer that Russia’s authoritarian law banning all advocacy of equality for gay people “one of the proudest achievements of my career.”
There doesn’t appear to be any limit to how extreme and deranged a radio talk show host can get in order to make Republican legislators stop going on their shows. No matter how appalling Bryan Fischer gets, even Republican presidential candidates flock to his show. Now even Gordon Klingenschmitt gets an in-person interview with Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado. The fact that a sitting congressman would go on a show with a guy who thinks he can identify the 50 demons possessing President Obama speaks volumes about how thoroughly the GOP has mainstreamed the right wing fringe.
E.W. Jackson, the Republican candidate to be the next lt. governor of Virginia, continues to strike the martyr pose and claim that when we quote the extremist and ignorant things he has said in the past, we’re persecuting him — and, bizarrely, violating the Constitution. On the Bryan Fischer show, he said:
Stan Solomon is becoming a star on the far right talk show circuit. He has no problem getting big name guests to come on his show, like Phyllis Schlafly, Alan Keyes and Virginia Lt. Governor candidate E.W. Jackson. And here’s an example of the kind of racist, bigoted, violent crap he spews on a daily basis:
From the Department of Extraordinary Chutzpah comes a report that Donald Rumsfeld — Donald F’ing Rumsfeld, for crying out loud — says that Obama hasn’t made the case for bombing Syria. The Guinness Book of World Records is investigating to see if this tops Bryan Fischer’s previous record for obliviousness to both reality and irony.
Bryan Fischer delivered one of his standard idiotic screeds about Russia’s new anti-gay law, bizarrely claiming that gay rights supporters should support those laws because of diversity. “”We’ve got plenty of room in our multicultural world for all sorts of different cultural values and trends,” Fischer said. “Isn’t this wonderful what Russia is doing. Let’s celebrate diversity and let’s support this tradition in the nation of Russia.” Right. Just like blacks should have supported those states that discriminated against them and attacked them with police dogs. It’s still astonishing to me that someone could be this stupid and irrational and manage to tie his shoes.
Rep. Steve King continues to deny that he said anything wrong in claiming that the overwhelming majority of Mexican immigrants are drug mules, appearing on Bryan Fischer’s radio show to claim that criticism of him proves that America “will not be able to sustain itself in the long run.” Narcissism, much?
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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